The Art Exhibitions Blog

Raphael died before he was 40, and yet he's still reckoned among the very greatest of Italian Renaissance artists. A new Raphael  exhibition at London's National Gallery aims to show him as an all-round giant -- in painting, sculpture, poetry, architecture and more -- exploring why he can be regarded on a level with Michelangelo and Leonardo. More than 90 examples of his work include loans from the Uffizi, the Vatican, the Louvre and the Prado. The show is on from April 9 to July 31, and standard tickets are an initially eye-catching £24 (more with Gift Aid). As we've noted before, prices for the biggest exhibitions in the capital have been steadily creeping upwards, but then £24 is relatively cheap compared with, say, the cost of tickets to a Premier League football match or a West End theatre performance. At the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, tickets are a reasonable-sounding £10 for Canaletto's Venice Revisited , which opens on April 1. This show features Can...

Work, work, work, of course. It was Thomas Edison who said genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, and for every artist's light-bulb moment, there'll be a lot of hours sitting in the studio.     A Century of the Artist's Studio: 1920-2020  at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London takes us to a hundred of those studios to witness the hard labour of the creative process in an ambitious and often fun exhibition.  "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday...." intone the voices in the video From March to April.... 2020 by the Dubai-based Ramin and Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian. Tehching Hsieh took it further.  One-Year Performance saw him clocking on daily. In Darren Almond's A Real Time Piece nothing disturbs the eerie quiet of the artist's empty studio apart from the loud thwock once a minute of the changing display of the mechanical digital clock on the wall. In this other piece by Almond there's not a sound to be heard, but if the...

Frans Hals had 27 blacks in his paintbox, according to Vincent van Gogh. How many whites did James McNeill Whistler have in his? You can make your own judgement in  Whistler's Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan  at the Royal Academy in London. Jo, the red-headed Irishwoman who modelled for the paintings at the heart of this excellent exhibition, was also Whistler's lover (and distinctly different from  Whistler's Mother ), and she was central to his early development as an artist.  As you enter this show, this is the picture of Jo you can see in the distance through the doorway to your right:  Symphony in White, No 1: The White Girl . Whistler started the painting in Paris late in 1861, posing Hiffernan for exhausting all-day sessions, and he submitted it to the Royal Academy's annual exhibition in London the following year.  "Some stupid painters don't understand it at all," Hiffernan wrote, adding that Whistler thought that "praps the old duffers may...

You may, like us, have seen her face in paintings before, but quite probably you haven't seen the art she made herself. In the 1920s and 30s, Eileen Mayo was an in-demand model for artists including Laura Knight , Dod Procter, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, but at the same time she was pursuing a career of her own as a creative artist in a range of media. She left Britain in the 1950s for Australia and then New Zealand; her name is little known in this country, but she became much more celebrated -- and honoured -- in Australasia.  Now, for the first time in Britain, she has an exhibition devoted to her.  Eileen Mayo: A Natural History  at Towner Eastbourne shows her as a model, a painter, a graphic artist, a designer of tapestries and stamps, and as a book illustrator. It's free to visit, and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Back in 2019, the Dulwich Picture Gallery put on an exhibition about the linocuts that emerged from the Grosvenor School of Art in Pimlico run by Claude F...